Louis Prima – The Wildest!

If you’d prefer to listen to the audio version of Louis Prima – The Wildest! then you can do so by using the SoundCloud Player at the bottom of the post or by subscribing on iTunes here!

This post is the seventh post of my new series based on the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die by Robert Dimery.

In this series I’m going to be looking through the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and commenting on the albums featured, telling you about albums I think should have been featured, artists that should have been featured too and just anything else I feel like commenting on!

This isn’t a sponsored series but if you’d like to read the book with me I’ll put a link at the bottom of this post to where you can buy it. This series is just something I wanted to do because I’d been reading the book and found that I had a lot of opinions!

Every Tuesday and Thursday I’m going to take one album from the front of the book starting in 1950s and one album from the back of the book starting in 2000’s, I’ll give you a bit of the albums history, the track list and of course my thoughts on the album!

In this post we’re going to be talking about Louis Prima – The Wildest!

As this album is available on Spotify I’ll put a player below this paragraph so that if you’d like to listen along whilst you read the rest of this post you can!

The Wildest was released in 1956 on Capitol, it was produced by Voyle Gilmore, the art director is uncredited and the run time is 32:00!

The first thing I want to comment on is something that stuck out to me at the very start of the article about this album in the book, it states rightly so that Louis Prima was a popular nightclub singer & trumpeter in the 1930’s and 40’s in his native New Orleans and New York.

If ever you needed a sign of how much the times have changed musically then there it is!

Louis Prima was a fantastic performer and he managed to ride the musical trends of his generation, rather successfully to I might add!

In the late 20s Louis Prima had a 7 piece New Orleans style jazz band, then he had a leading swing combo in the 1930s, a big band in the 1940s, and a Las Vegas lounge act in the 1950s!

I am a huge fan of Louis Prima, his music is so happy and joyous and is just the sort of music you can’t help but smile and dance too!

Everything about the album The Wildest is happy too! Even the album sleeve that features a grinning / laughing Louis Prima that you have to be very cold and hard not to smile back at!

In the article about the album in the book they say that ‘this is simply irrepressible music that more than matches its glorious cover shot, Prima is joyous, rumbustious and irresistible.’ It’s such a true statement!

And my favourite track from the 2002 reissue is Banana Split For My Baby!

I love this entire album though, as I said above it’s a really happy album that it’s impossible not to sing, smile and dance along too!

The main question that I have to answer is whether or not I think this album belongs on the list of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die?

I ABSOLUTELY DO! I think everyone should be MADE to listen to this album, it’s such a happy care free album that I’m sure could make even the most miserable people smile!

That’s it for this post from my new series based on the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die! As I said at the beginning of this post this isn’t in anyway a sponsored series but if you’d like to buy the book so you can read along with me then click here for the link to purchase from Waterstones if you live in the UK and click here for the Amazon link if you’re in the rest of the world.

Those aren’t affiliate links; I just want to make sure you guys know where to buy the book if you want to read along too!

If you would like to read any of the posts from this series then you can find them all by clicking here!